Quote from Writing As Resistance

Writing As Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum

by Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania         © 1997    224 pp.

To what extent do we remain obligated to the world even when we have been expelled from it or have withdrawn from it?  -- Hannah Arendt

The literary acts of Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Ann Frank, and Etty Hillesum offer a complex but unequivocal answer to Hannah Arendt's poignant question. . . As transmitted by their work, their sense of obligation to the world did not cease under the most trying circumstances. Stein's escape from Germany to Holland after Kristallnacht, Weil's flight from France to Casablanca and then to New York in 1942, Frank's entrapment in the Annex, and Hillesum's stay in Westerbork highlight the extent of their banishment, and condemnation to death. Nevertheless, all four continued to voice their dismay about humanity's moral condition and to express their anxious hope for spiritual rehabilitation in the future. The following expressions of concern for the world in moments of displacement and danger provide a glimpse into the four women's ethical steadfastness.  (p. 16)

-- submitted by Jennifer Knight